Freight + Volume is thrilled to present Karen Finley's More Desperate Than Ever, a solo exhibition of recent work which includes a wide variety of Finley's practice: painting, installation, and performance-based projects. The show is comprised of three distinct bodies of work with a special participatory element serving as the living center of the exhibition. Addressing themes of grief, healing, public funding rescision, and the ironies and absurdities of censorship, the presentation brings together painted images, text, and viewer interaction, transforming the gallery into a snapshot of our particular time and place through the eyes of one of the Great Agitators of Our Time (the GAOT if you will). Freight + Volume NYC and its sister gallery DNA in Provincetown, MA, celebrate 30 years of working with this legendary artist.

The centerpiece of the show is the large installation Your Grant is Denied, 2025 which takes words themselves as subject rather than bearer of meaning. On March 7th, 2025, The New York Times published a list of words and phrases that the new administration has highlighted as unacceptable for use in federal documents, websites, court orders, or educational curricula. The list also represents words that would flag grant applications for review or denial out of fear that the projects proposed would cut against the current administration's executive orders. Under these new guidelines, everyday words - such as Belonging, Women, Identity, and Equality - become dangerous markers of seditious anti-American sentiment. Made up of 360 five-by-seven-inch panels, the work brings these banned words to the fore. Written on grounds of swirling blue and picked out in gold, the canvas tiles call to mind illuminated medieval manuscripts, elevating the words to holy icons and images in their own right; a Rosetta Stone of defiance. The work highlights the absurdity of this level of censorship, the laughable fear of language exhibited by the impulse to suppress it. Finley calls attention to the way the very act of censorship is its own type of elevation, how the fear turns the words to weapons; the Streisand Effect in action. 

Finley herself is no stranger to censorship, having been on the receiving end of it numerous times. Most famously in 1990, Finley, along with artists Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes were denied access to funds awarded to them by the National Endowment for the Arts, by then Chairperson John Frohnmayer on the grounds that their performances were obscene, a questionable overreach of authority. Frohnmayer argued that nudity was inherently sexual, that critique was inherently terroristic, and that the moral integrity of the art viewing public would be threatened by anything that may inspire a moment of critical thought. The echoes of the resulting Supreme Court case are evident in the recent gutting of the NEA itself, proof of the adage “The more things change, the more they stay the same”.  In 2023, Finley’s Go Figure, the original Whitney Museum cancelled installation of life-drawing as performance, was re-enacted in partnership with Freight+Volume at its Art Basel Miami Beach booth, on the 25th anniversary of the NEA rescision, reaffirming its presence in the art historical canon and proving that free speech can’t ever die.

In the Artist as Historical Recorder series, Finley wrestles with the role of artist as documentarian and shaper of visual histories. Continuing with a text-based approach, Finley uses a myriad of sources in this series: appropriated photographs, pages from children’s books, music scores, and postcards as grounds for textual musings. By turns humorous, hopeful, and haunted by rage, the works read as swiftly-jotted field notes for our inexplicable new reality: how we got here and where we could conceivably go. These works amplify the juxtaposition of text and image, finding humor and meaning in the spaces between the two.

Finley’s work has always straddled the lines of serious and humorous, and finding the irony in life's setbacks has been the common denominator of her career. In Finley's Holding Grief Paintings (The Grey Painting Series), grief is explored in a pared-back style of metaphor and dream. The paintings are a departure for Finley, who is primarily known as a bombastic performance artist, but the imagery is consistently her own. Within the past year, Finley lost a family member suddenly and tragically, and the shock and trauma of the event challenged her ability to find adequate words to effectively share the enormity of the experience with others. Without words - artistically mute - she began painting with a palette focused on "Payne's Grey” with intention. 

Finley began with intimate paintings of figures emerging from churning water, rendered with a surrealistic dreaminess reminiscent of Chagall. The subject matter evolved as the series did, taking reference from old photographs, memories, and fairytales, creating a recurring cast of human and feline characters who move through this grey in-between space as though native to it. Though Payne's (and pain) make up the fabric of these paintings, Finley has embellished them with washes of luminous pearlescent pigments - iridescent white, pale pink, gold, and silver - that shine through the grey as reminders of beauty even amidst grief. 

The emblematic thesis of the exhibition is to be found in the Hope Chest, a small strongbox filled with sand into which viewers are invited to transcribe their hopes and dreams for the future with their finger as their own private scrutineers. The sandbox becomes a community-oriented zen-garden, a collective, ephemeral diary which allows a moment of reflection amongst a swirl of turmoil: a place to record the weight we carry. Like spokes on a wheel, the disparate parts of the exhibition - grief, politics, humor, oppression, expression, suppression, aging, and turning tides - spin around the human chest and the hopes and dreams of the individual to be found inside. To record one’s hope just momentarily and embody it in space, in turn offers - if not a solution to the questions that plague us - at least a brief, temporary reprieve.